Kafka Monthly Digest: August 2022

This 55th edition of the Kafka Monthly Digest covers what happened in the Apache Kafka community in August 2022.

For last month’s digest, see Kafka Monthly Digest: July 2022.

Releases

There is currently one release in progress, 3.3.0.

3.3.0

The release process for 3.3.0 continued. José Armando García Sancio published the first release candidate on August 29. A few issues, including KAFKA-14187 and KAFKA-14156, were found during testing, so José built RC1 on September 1. The vote is currently ongoing. You can find the release plan in the wiki.

Kafka Improvement Proposals

Last month, the community submitted three Kafka Improvement Proposals (KIPs) (KIP-863 to KIP-865). I'll highlight a couple of them:

• KIP-864: Add End-To-End Latency Metrics to Connectors. This KIP proposes adding a few new metrics to track end-to-end latency for records flowing through Connect. This would also include metrics tracking the time spent in converters.

• KIP-865: Support --bootstrap-server in kafka-streams-application-reset. This very small KIP aims at addressing a discrepancy with the kafka-streams-application-reset.sh tool. This tool currently uses the --bootstrap-servers flag, while all other tools use --bootstrap-server, so it will be updated for consistency.

Community releases

• akhq 0.22: AKHQ is a GUI for Apache Kafka. This new version adds a few new features, including support for listing ACLs on Cluster and TransactionalIds and sending Protobuf records via the UI.
• kafkajs 2.2.0: Kafkajs is a pure JavaScript Kafka client for Node.js. This release adds support for triggering and listing partition reassignments in its Admin API and contains a few fixes.

Blogs

I selected some interesting blog articles that were published last month:

• Machine Learning Streaming with Kafka, Debezium, and BentoML
• Building CQRS Views with Debezium, Kafka, Materialize, and Apache Pinot — Part 1
• Building CQRS Views with Debezium, Kafka, Materialize, and Apache Pinot — Part 2

To learn more about Kafka, visit Red Hat Developer's Apache Kafka topic page.